E-Mail DURHAM, N.C. - For decades, psychologists' study of emotional health and well-being has involved contrived laboratory experiments and self-report questionnaires to understand the emotional experiences and strategies study participants use to manage stress. But those hundreds of studies may have taken for granted a pretty big complicating factor, argues a new study from Duke University and Dartmouth College. The study, which appears March 12 in PLOS One, says the background level of anxiety a person normally experiences may interfere with how they behave in the lab setting. "The paper is not saying all of this work is wrong," emphasized first author Daisy Burr, a graduate student in psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "It's just saying, 'Hey, there's this really interesting unknown here that we should all be examining.' "